For many reasons I couldn't find time to develop this game properly. Instead of releasing a half baked game like I did in the previous competition I'll simply forget about releasing it this year. I'm still (slowly) working on it but it'll probably be done next year at best.

See you soon !

Starting early for the next NESDev competition so I have no excuses to deliver a rushed, cut-down game this time.

Very tiny story draft: You're a plain clothed ENFORCER in a future where humans are ruled by an oppressive alien government. They seem to have tremendous power and very advanced technology, yet very few people know what they look like or what is their purpose on earth. They don't seem to care about trivial things such as violent robbers roaming the decaying cities, but interfere with their plans and they'll send an autonomous robot to your doorstep... if you manage to evade the alien bots they have a surprisingly effective way to track you down without getting their hands dirty - that's the ENFORCER's job.

Bring "justice" to "criminals", bring food to the table, live another day... until you decide to become a "criminal" yourself and start fighting against the alien rule.

--

I won't say much about what I want to do with the concept above (since I'll probably change it a lot until the game is finished), but this will basically be kind of a dungeon crawler, with an OK sized overworld that tries to look like a city with buildings, which leads to smaller maps in buildings and dungeons. Some overworld areas and most of the interior maps will have random encounters with gang members and mutant creatures, like the usual oversized RPG rat for example. I'm still trying to figure out how combat will work, I'm thinking about melee only (knifes, blunt weapons, etc.) and a very limited amount of ammo for a handgun you carry (one shot kill for human enemies). For enemies with firearms I intend to have only sub-bosses to have them for the exclusive purpose of implementing a "quick-draw" minigame (the true purpose for having a limited ammo gun), or maybe not if this idea turns out to be crap.

I have made mockups of how the game is supposed to look and I aim to get as close as possible to the screencap below. Doing the 1st person dungeon view like the mockup should not be a problem, double height walls and pits are going to be a nice bonus but I can scrap them if they're not viable to implement (unlikely)... I also intend to add some detail with sprites but not that will make the final game differ too much from the mockups.

I feel like while the visuals are simplistic it conveys the idea of being in a "city" in a convincing manner... I'll later add tiles for doors and sprites for traffic signs to improve the visuals but in my opinion the minimalist art is good, what do you guys think? I'm also avoiding having too much detail so I can simplify programming and fit the game into the competition's memory limit, so keep that in mind.

"RGB CGA" palette version I did just for fun -- maybe I should include this palette as a "PC mode"?

Mental note: time to relearn huffman encoding for the ingame text compression.Mental note #2: time to redeem myself from the abysmal attribute handling I did for Brick Breaker (aka NONE).

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Last edited by Punch on Sat Nov 18, 2017 3:34 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I'm loving this concept! I totally dig these kinds of games even though most of the existing ones from the 80s were quite horrible. I'm getting a strong Shin Megami Tensei or Snatcher vibe already. Will definitely be following this closely.

double height walls and pits are going to be a nice bonus but I can scrap them if they're not viable to implement (unlikely)... I also intend to add some detail with sprites but not that will make the final game differ too much from the mockups.

"RGB CGA" palette version I did just for fun -- maybe I should include this palette as a "PC mode"?

Ooh, a classic dungeon crawler!? I had one of those in the works a while back, but I haven't had the time to work on it.

Alp, those screens look amazing... I'm starting to reconsider the look of my game now I also love how flexible your design is in regards to wall three dimensionality, but I feel like there are too many unique tiles required to draw all possible screens due to pattern overlap. How many tiles did you spend on your screens?

I need to find a decent tool to create art, even something like a 1-point perspective corridor is difficult to draw using NES Screen Tool or YY-CHR.

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As for drawing art, I'd choose any pixel art tool, there are plenty, and then build conversion scripts which work directly with png or bmp files. That's a very important part of my toolchain - having automatic conversion & import of graphics makes your job way easier. You can comfortably retouch a couple of pixels or even change palletes, then recompile and see your results within seconds.

I need to find a decent tool to create art, even something like a 1-point perspective corridor is difficult to draw using NES Screen Tool or YY-CHR.

I use GIMP to draw graphics, then use makechr to convert to NES format. makechr is cross-platform, has a gui and command-line version, runs quickly, and has lots of options and features for how to process images.

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